Well, we got into these businesses from meeting industry insiders and specialists. You sit down with people, chat, and find out business opportunities. Just today we evaluated festival, trade show and expo opportunities; took me about 10 hours to study the industry and see potential, I am still evaluating it, but there is no reason for YC not to understand it fully.
Seems like the whole startup scene is focused on web-based tools and utilities, while we're focused in real-world businesses.
What you describe sounds more like a small business than a startup. YC only funds startups (i.e. scalable and disruptive). The two are not synonymous. YC primarily funds software and web-based companies because you can create a scalable and disruptive web-based company on $20k.
I find real-world business refreshing (compared to the reality bubble of web-startups-only). I'd say, go ahead apply. You will at least get noticed easier than the next twitter clone.
By the way, I am also interested in operations research. (I write my thesis about the very real-world problem of scheduling at Deutsche Bahn.)
